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ERASMUS AND THE COMMA JOHANNEUM

May 19, 2009 at 2:00 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The history of the study of the New Testament is far from being a subject of wide popular interest, even among New Testament scholars themselves’ Yet there is one episode in this history which is surprisingly well known among both theologians and non-theologians I refer to the history of the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5, 7b-8a) in the editions of the New Testament edited by Erasmus It is generally known that Erasmus omitted this passage from his first edition of 1516 and his second of 1519, and only restored it in his third edition of 1522.

The current version of the story Is as follows Erasmus is supposed to have replied to the criticism which was directed against him because of his omission, by proposing to include it if a single Greek manuscript could be brought forward as evidence When such a manuscript was produced, lie is said to have kept his word, even though from the outset he was suspicious that the manuscript had been written in order to oblige hum to include the Comma Johanneum. We cite the version of the story given by Bruce M Metzger, since his work, thanks to its obvious qualities, has become an influential handbook and is in many respects representative of the knowledge of New Testament textual history among theologians “In an unguarded moment Erasmus promised that he would insert the Comma Johanneum, as it is called, in future editions if a single Greek manuscript could be found that contained the passage At length such a copy was found or was made to order it. As it now appears, the Greek manuscript had probably been written in Oxford about 1520 by a Franciscan friar named Froy (or Roy), who took the disputed words from the Latin Vulgate Erasmus stood by his promise and inserted the passage in his third edition (1522), but lie indicates in a lengthy footnote his suspicions that the manuscript had been prepared expressly in order to confute hum”‘.

This version of events has been handed down and disseminated for more than a century and a half by the most eminent critics and students of the text of the New Testament, for example S P Tregelles (1854), F J A Hort (1881)4, F H A Scrivener (1883)5, B F Westcott (1892)6, A Bludau (1903)’, Eb Nestle (1903)’, C H Turner (1924)’ and F G Kenyon (1901, 1912/1926)’. The same tradition has also been disseminated in a number of works intended for a wider public interested in the textual transmission of the Bible or other ancient literature, for example in the works of W A Copinger (1897)”, T H Darlow and H F Motile (1903)12, L D Reynolds and N G Wilson (1974)13 and J Finegan (1974/5)14 The story of the way Erasmus is said to have honoured his promise is also handed down in the hteratuie which refers specifically to the humanist himself, for example by P S Allen (1910)’ and by the authors of such excellent biographies as those by Preseived Smith (1923) ” and R H Bainton (1969) ” How often must those who lecture in the New Testament or textual criticism at universities the world over have passed on the story of the good faith with which a deceived Erasmus kept his word, to the students in their lecture halls’ The writer of these lines cannot plead innocence in this respect.

Yet there are a number of difficulties in the story of Erasmus’ promise and its consequences, which arouse a certain suspicion of its truthfulness. In the first place it is remarkable that there is no trace of this tradition in the works of the great experts in the history of the text of the New Testament in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries We find not a word of it in Richard Simon’s Histone critique du these du Nouveau Testament (1689) even though a special chapter of this work (ch. xvni) is devoted to the Comma Johanneum John Mills too is completely silent about Erasmus’ promise, although in paragraph 1 138 of the Prolegomena to his Novum Testamentum Graecum he refers specifically to the inclusion of the Comma Johanneum in the third edition of Erasmus’ New Testament He even adds the interesting detail that Erasmus included the Comma Johanneum as early as June 1521, in a separate edition of his Latin translation published by Froben at Basle This detail is important because it helps to determine the period of time within which Erasmus must have become aware of the Comma Johanneum in Greek He was still unaware of it in May 1520 when he wrote his apologia Libei to this against Edward Lee. Thus, he must have received evidence of the passage between May 1520 and June 1521. It is not known who brought it to his attention. Not only do Simon and Mills make no reference to Erasmus’ promise, J Clericus does not mention it, either in his Ais Cittica (1696, often reprinted) or his commentary on I John 5,7 (17142). Nor do we find it in J J Wettstein  (1751/2), Jle Long C F Boeiner A G Masch (1788/90)”, J D Michaelis (1788)20, G W Meyer (1802/9)21, J Townley  (the author of Biblical Ane(dotes, 1821)22 or in T F Dibdin (1827)22.

The earliest reference to Erasmus’ promise of which I am aware is that of T H Horne in 1818-24. It remains unclear from which source Horne delved his information. He was too scrupulous a critic to raise any suspicion that he was the inventor of the whole story. Moreover, Horne himself published a list of mole than fifty volumes, pamphlets of crucial notices on the Comma Johanneum which had appealed up to his time’s He may thus very well have derived the details from a predecessor but it is scarcely feasible to go through all his material again. A second difficulty is that in the retelling of the story of Erasmus’ supposed promise, there are striking variations Some authors, such as Hoinc, Darlow and Moule, Kenyon and Turner, relate that Erasmus made this promise in the controversy with his Spanish opponent Jacobus Lopis Stunica. Others, among them Bludau and Bamton, say that the promise was given to his English assailant Edward Lee Yet others write, without making a clear distinction, that Erasmus gave his promise in reaction to the catechisms of both Lee and Stunica, while others again leave it indeterminate, to whom the promise was directed.

Now it is completely impossible that Erasmus could have given his pledge to Stunica, for he did not address himself to the Spaniard until his Apologia…of September 1521 2G In this apologia he explains, in dealing with 1 John 5, that he had received a transcript of the Comma Johanneum, from a Codex Britannicus, and had inserted it into the text of 1 John, which was shortly to appear in a new impression of his Novum Testamentum (15223). Therefore, Erasmus can hardly have given Stunica any promise containing the condition, if a single Greek manuscript with the Comma Johanneum is found”. Nor did Erasmus give such a promise to Lee at least not in any of the surviving correspondence 2′ or apologias 2s in which the Rotterdammer addressed Lee.

A third problem is that the famous promise of Erasmus is not to be found anywhere else in his oeuvre It is thus not surprising that, with one exception, none of the authors known to me who relate the story, refer to a specific passage in Erasmus or in other sixteenth-century literature, where such a pledge is to be found. The only exception is Bainton, who himself seems to have become suspicious and eventually includes a reference to a passage which is by no means a promise, as will be clear from what follows”.

It is naturally exceptionally difficult, if not impossible in principle to furnish conclusive proof that someone did not say something. Yet in my opinion there is sufficient reason to assume that Erasmus, when he chose to insert the Comma Johanneum, did not feel himself constrained by any promise. He explained on several occasions what had led him to include this passage in his third edition He did so `so that no one would have occasion to criticize me out of malice”…or as he expressed it in his Annotationes on 1 John 5, 7…

It should be borne in mind that Lee had written that the omission of the Comma Johanneum brought with it the danger of a new revival of Arianism This was of course a very serious insinuation Erasmus had reason to fear that if he were suspected of heretical sympathies, his Novum Testamentum would miss its exalted goal. This Novum Testamentum was not in the first place intended as an edition of the Greek New Testament, as is incorrectly assumed. It was, in Erasmus’ intention, in the first place a new, modern and readable translation of the New Testament into Latin The function of the Greek text was secondary it was to show that Erasmus’ new version rested on a firm foundation and that it was not Just a reckless search for novelty. By his new translation Erasmus hoped to make the words of Christ and the apostles accessible to a wide circle in clear and easily understood prose. He wished to fill the world with the philosophta Christ, the simple pious and practical Christianity which would best serve the world. To achieve this, as many people as possible had to read the New Testament.

But not the Vulgate which was full of all sorts of obscurities; a new, more readable and clearer translation was necessary, and that was Erasmus’ Novum Instrumentum from 1519 entitled Novum Tcstamuitum. The goal of Erasmus undertaking to imbue all Europe with a clear and simple gospel threatened to fail if Erasmus himself were tinged with any suspicion of unorthodoxy. For the sake of his ideal Erasmus chose to avoid any occasion for slander rather than persisting in philological accuracy and thus condemning himself to impotence. That was the reason why Erasmus included the Comma Johanneum even though he remained convinced that it did not belong to the original text of 1 John.

The real reason which induced Erasmus to include the Comma Johanneum was thus clearly his care for his good name and for the success of his Novum Tcstamcntum. How then did the famous story arise of his promise and the way in which he honored it? It is likely that it grew out of a misinterpretation of a passage in his Rcsponsio ad Annotationcs Eduaich Lci of May 15203 Lee was a truly quarrelsome individual a myopically conservative theologian later archbishop of York who troubled and pestered. Erasmus for several years with his criticisms which were unusually mediocre of the Novum Inbtiumuttum Lee was one of several critics who had remarked on the absence of the Comma Johamuum in the first two editions. In 1520 Erasmus felt himself obliged to snake a detailed reply to Lee In his lengthy discussion of 1 John 5.7…

If a single manuscript had come into my hands in which stood what we read (Sc in the Latin Vulgate) then I would certainly have used it to fill in what was missing in the other manuscripts I had Because that did not happen I have taken the only course which was permissible that is I have indicated (se in the Annotations) what was missing from the Greek manuscripts. This is the passage which Bainton regarded as containing the promise which Erasmus is supposed to have redeemed later. It is to Banton s credit that he at least tried to find the promise somewhere in Erasmus works no other author so far as I am aware took this trouble. Still no such promise can be read into the passage cited It is a retrospective report of what Erasmus had done in 1516 and 1519 If he had had a Greek manuscript with the Comma Johanncum then he would have included the Comma. But he had not found a single such manuscript and consequently he omitted the Comma Johanneum. This is not a promise but a justification after the event of what had happened cast in the unfulfilled conditional. It is not impossible that another passage in Erasmus apologia against Lee played a part and gave reason for a misunderstanding. It was with particular reference to Erasmus omission of the Comma Johanneum that Lee had charged him with indolence (“supinitas”). According to Lee, Erasmus might very well have had, by some chance, a manuscript which gave an abbreviated text of 1 John 5,7-8, but he ought not to have published, on two occasions, the mutilated text of this manuscript, without consulting other manuscripts. Lee here suggests that Erasmus, if he had looked at other codices, would certainly have found a copy which contained the Comma Johanneum, but that he had been remiss in not doing so In his answer to this charge Erasmus explains that he consulted not just one but many manuscripts in England, Brabant and Basle, none of which contained the Comma Johanneum. He continues…”What sort of indolence is that, if I did not consult the manuscripts which I could not manage to haves At least, I collected as many as I could Let Lee produce a Greek manuscript in which is written the words lacking in my edition, and let him prove that I had access to this manuscript, and then let him accuse me of indolence”.

Nor can this passage be interpreted as a promise by Erasmus to include the Comma Johanncum if it is shown to him in a single Greek manuscript Erasmus is here defending himself against the accusation of having deliberately neglected to search for Greek manuscripts in which the Comma Johanncum occurs. The accusation of Stunica was thus, according to Erasmus, premature Let Lee first prove that Erasmus neglected a manuscript containing the Comma Johanneum. If Lee can prove this negligence, with the evidence, then and only then will Erasmus accept Lee’s accusation of Stunica Erasmus does not say that if Lee can prove this negligence, he will include the Comma Johanneum but only that in such a case… Erasmus is not thinking of the possibility that he would have to insert the Comma Johanneum, for he regarded it as completely out of the question that the Comma should turn up in any Greek manuscript The only point he is making is let Lee first prove my point, and then he can accuse me of it. The passage therefore does not contain any promise, but an exhortation to prove the truth of an accusation before making it.

Another misunderstanding deserves to be corrected. As we showed above, Erasmus received a Greek text of the Comma Johanneum at some time between May 1520 and June 1521. This text had been copied from a Codex Britannicus also named, after a later owner, Codex Montfortianus, and now at Trinity College, Dublin (A 421), and designated as minuscule Gregory 61 It is as good as certain, as J R Harris demonstrated, that this manuscript was produced to order. Many writers on this subject, for example Tregelles, Kenyon and Metzger, assert that Erasmus himself suspected at the time that the Codex Britannicus had been produced to oblige him to include the Comma Johanneum. This is again a version of events which does not seem to be based on any passage in Erasmus’ printed works or letters. It is true that Erasmus assumed that the Codex Britannicus was “recens”. But so far as I am aware, his writings do not contain any expression from which it would appear that he suspected that the Codex Britannicus had been written especially to induce him to include the Comma Johanneum. The confusion presumably arose from a misunderstanding of a remark which Erasmus made in his first apologia against Stunica, and repeated in his Annotations on 1 John 5. After declaring that now that the Comma Johanneum had been brought to his attention, in Greek, in a Codex Britannicus, he would include it on the basis of that manuscript, he wrote…”Although I suspect this manuscript, too, to have been revised after the manuscripts of the Latin world”.

Erasmus does not mean by this that the Codex Britannicus was interpolated to invalidate his own reading He means that the Codex, like many other manuscripts, contained a text which had been revised after, and adapted to, the Vulgate. This was one of Erasmus’ stock theories, to which he repeatedly referred in evaluating Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. He regarded manuscripts which deviated from the Byzantine text known to him, and showed parallels with the Vulgate, as having been influenced by the Vulgate”. Erasmus believed that the Ecumenical Council of Ferrara and Florence (1438-45), whose chief object had been the reunion of the Latin and Greek churches, had decided in favor of adapting the Greek manuscripts to the Vulgate In 1527 he commented on the adaptation of Greek manuscripts to the Latin as follows…”It should be pointed out here in passing, that certain Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have been corrected in agreement with those of the Latin Christians. This was done at the time of the reunion of the Greeks and the Roman church. This union was confirmed in writing in the so-called Golden Bull It was thought that this (sc the adaptation of the Greek biblical manuscripts to the Latin) would contribute to the strengthening of unity We too once came across a manuscript of this nature”, and it is said that such a manuscript is still preserved in the papal library written in majuscule characters”. The manuscript to which Erasmus refers at the end of this passage is the Codex Vaticanus pat excellence, now Gr 1209, designated as B40 Erasmus regarded the text of this codex as influenced by the Vulgate and therefore inferior. For the same reasons he had earlier, in 1515/6, also excluded Gregory I as an inferior manuscript, from the constitution of the Greek text of his own Novum Instiumentum although this manuscript is now generally regarded as more reliable than the codices which Erasmus preferred and made use of Erasmus passed the same verdict on the Codex Rhodiensis (minuscule Wettstein Paul 50 =Apostolos 52) from which Stunted cited readings in his polemic against Erasmus.

Erasmus’ view, according to which Greek manuscripts had been adapted to Latin, was indeed applicable to the Codex Britannicus the Comma Johanneum was no more than retroversion of the Vulgate. But for most other manuscripts…The Bulla aura of the Council of Ferrara and Florence says nothing at all of any decision to revise Greek biblical manuscripts in accordance with the Vulgate. In 1534 Erasmus admitted that he had not read the bull himself, but only knew its content from hearsay. He maintained, however, that even if the bull did not say anything about the intended latinisation of Greek manuscripts, this latinisation had in fact been carried out in some cases.

However erroneous Erasmus’ theory of the latinisation of Greek manuscripts may be in general, from an historical viewpoint it has played an important role. When J J Wettstein was working on his great edition of the New Testament which eventually appeared in 1751/2 he became increasingly convinced that the text of most of the old Greek codices was influenced by the old Latin translation

He subscribed to Erasmus’ evaluation of codex B and minuscule 1, but he also extended the theory to the majority of the old codices, among others, A, B, C, D’, DP, FP, Ke, Le, min 1, 3 etc. He regarded all these manuscripts as unusable for the constitution of the text of the New Testament. Wettstein’s title to fame was formed by his excellent presentation of the copious text-critical material which he had collected, as well as by his commentary, but not by his insight into the history of the text.

It is time that Erasmus repeatedly disqualified the Codex Vaticanus as a latinising textual witness. Yet it should be pointed out nonetheless, that Erasmus was also the first scholar who appealed to the Codex Vaticanus for critical purposes. On 18 June 1521, Paul Bombasius, the secretary of the influential cardinal Lorenzo Pucci at Rome, sent a letter to Erasmus containing a copy of 1 John 4, 1-3 and 5,7-11 from the Codex Vatieanus. In his Annotations, on 1 John 5,7 Erasmus later stated that the Comma Johanneum was missing from the Codex Vaticanus, according to a transcript which Bombasius had made at his, Erasmus’, request (meo 1•ogo1u). It appears from this that Erasmus himself had asked Bombasius to verify the passage in question in the Codex Vaticanus. It is with Erasmus that the Codex Vaticanus began to play a role in the textual criticism of the New Testament. Again, Erasmus also suspected the Codex Britannicus of having undergone the influence of the Vulgate. It cannot, however, be shown from Erasmus’ writings, that he ever considered the Codex Britannicus as a product specially prepared to induce him to include the Comma Johanneum.

Conclusions

(1) The current view that Erasmus promised to insert the Comma Johanneum if it could be shown to hum in a single Greek manuscript, has no foundation in Erasmus’ works. Consequently it is highly improbable that he included the disputed passage because he considered himself bound by any such promise.

(2) It cannot be shown from Erasmus’ works that he suspected the Codex Britannicus (nun 61) of being written with a view to force him to include the Comma Johanneum.

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